Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity PDF
Preview Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity
GenderinG the recession GenderinG the Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity recession Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, editors Duke University Press / Durham and London / 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Typeset in Quadraat and Meta by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Gendering the recession : media and culture in an age of austerity / Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, editors. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5687-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5696-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sex role—Economic aspects. 2. Global Financial Crisis, 2008– 2009. 3. Women—Employment. 4. Women in development. i. Negra, Diane, 1966– ii. Tasker, Yvonne, 1964– hq1075.g463 2014 331.4—dc23 2013042832 CONTENTS Acknowledgments / vii introduction. Gender and Recessionary Culture / 1 Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker one. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker / 31 Suzanne Leonard two. “Latina Wisdom” in “Postrace” Recession Media / 59 Isabel Molina- Guzmán three. “We Are All Workers”: Economic Crisis, Masculinity, and the American Working Class / 81 Sarah Banet- Weiser Four. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-E ra Chick Flick / 107 Pamela Thoma Five. Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the “New” Pleasures of Fashion / 136 Elizabeth Nathanson six. The (Re)possession of the American Home: Negative Equity, Gender Inequality, and the Housing Crisis Horror Story / 161 Tim Snelson seven. House and Home: Structuring Absences in Post–Celtic Tiger Documentary / 181 Sinéad Molony eight. “Stuck between Meanings”: Recession- Era Print Fictions of Crisis Masculinity / 203 Hamilton Carroll nine. Fairy Jobmother to the Rescue: Postfeminism and the Recessionary Cultures of Reality tv / 223 Hannah Hamad ten. How Long Can the Party Last? Gendering the European Crisis on Reality tv / 246 Anikó Imre bibliogrAphy / 273 contributors / 299 index / 303 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to thank Shelley Cobb, Monica Cullinan of the James Joyce Library at University College Dublin, Nick Daly, Tamara Falicov, Paula Gilligan, Debbie Ging, Aisling Jackman, Karen Jackman, Liam Kennedy and the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, Anthony McIntyre, Gerardine Meaney and the ucd Humanities Institute, Moya Luckett, Christopher Holmes Smith, Ciaran Toner, and Erica Wetter. For help in assembling the final manuscript we particularly thank Elizabeth Rawitsch and Rachel Hall. Working with Courtney Berger, Liz Smith, Heather Hensley, and Willa Armstrong at Duke University Press has been a pleasure. The editors gratefully acknowledge the permission of Oxford University Press to partially reprint material by Sarah Banet- Weiser first published in Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, edited by Manuel Castells, João Ca- raça, and Gustavo Cardoso. INTRODUCTION DIANE NEGRA AND YVONNE TASKER Gender and Recessionary Culture After a decade and a half of frenetic economic activity in the West, now often remembered as a boom period, the semicollapse of the global financial sys- tem in 2007–8 inaugurated a set of profound cultural shifts. During the boom the celebration of a market mind- set overarching all aspects of life coincided with an intensification of polarized gender norming that we and others have written about under the aegis of postfeminism. Postfeminist culture’s key tropes—a preoccupation with self- fashioning and the makeover; women’s seeming “choice” not to occupy high-s tatus public roles; the celebration of sexual expression and affluent femininities—are enabled by the optimism and opportunity of prosperity (or the perception of it). Framed by what com- mentators have dubbed the Great Recession, this book asks whether and to what extent the conceptual and theoretical accounts of gender developed in an earlier and distinctly different economic era still apply. While fields ranging from economics to sociology to equality studies have much to contribute in analyzing the recession’s social character, media studies offers a unique disciplinary pathway for interpreting recession cul- ture given its focus on the analysis of collective symbolic environments that hold enormous sway in shaping public views. Indeed, we contend here that our economic lives are both shaped by and embedded within popular and rep- resentational culture. As a consequence, any account of the economic con- ditions of the global recession will be incomplete without taking into con-
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